


Dwellings of the Ancient Gods

by Nosferatank



Category: A Hat in Time (Video Game)
Genre: Alien Geometries, Aliens, Anthropomorphic Personification, Canon Compliant, Dwellers being criminally adorable, EDIT: html is now un-fucked, Gen, Ghosts, Handwavey Physics, Hat Kid POV comes with Snatcher-roasting free of charge, It’s a bit weird but they are the same being in a way, POV Third Person Limited, Twilight Bell as a character and that character is the Twilight Goat, Twilight Bell- Freeform, Worldbuilding, at least a very offhand kind of worldbuilding baked into the narration, eldritch location, in that there’s nothing in canon to technically disprove it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:42:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25343377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nosferatank/pseuds/Nosferatank
Summary: "I don't know where that bell took me, but it certainly wasn't somewhere I was supposed to be."-Hat Kid’s DiaryThe Twilight Bell was a spectral trap. It was alsoalive.
Relationships: Hat Kid & Snatcher (A Hat in Time), Hat Kid & Subcon Dwellers (A Hat in Time), Hat Kid & Twilight Goat (A Hat in Time)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 80





	Dwellings of the Ancient Gods

**Author's Note:**

> …..And now for something completely different! It’s not my usual fandom fare, but I hope the folks over in the ahit fandom enjoy it! One of my mutuals put it on my dash and uh. Yeah. So here we are!
> 
> Quick little bits for the fic, with more notes at the end:
> 
> For Hat Kid’s native language, I used Standard Galactic Alphabet (or, if you’re a #Gamer™, the minecraft enchantment table letters)
> 
> -‘ᖋᕊᖋリ↸ᒍリᒷ↸’: Abandoned
> 
> -Aリᔑリ▢ᒷ: Ananke, which is a name.
> 
> -Eᔑ∷ℸ ̣ ⍑: Earth
> 
> -‘Doelings’ is a term for female adolescent goats
> 
> -Hattie’s age is a little hard to pin down (and I’ve never been the best with writing child characters), but the general vibe here is that she’s about twelve.

Hattie was, at this point, fairly certain that had anyone on the Tempus Council happened upon the Twilight Bell before she did, the entire planet of Earth would’ve been quarantined for the next hundred cycles. Because this place was _messed up_.

The pathway up to the Twilight Bell itself was innocuous, as far as Earth structures went. The cliffsides had little glowing crystal hoofprints embedded in the stone. The nomads were happy enough to point her in the right direction, though they tacked on warnings of it being ‘a sacred place to the goat-folk– so look, but don’t touch!’

She touched.

Day rang into night, and the world twisted on itself like a manifold.

The moment her feet hit the ground, Hattie dropped to her hands and knees, because _ow_ , headache, _way_ too much sensory input. Her kind was meant to operate in only four dimensions, not… whatever was going on here. If it could even be neatly categorized into dimensions, instead of just the quantum equivalent of reality shrugging and going ‘I dunno’.

The inside of the Bell was like starlight stroking the strings of time, and that sensation against her species’ natural senses was profoundly _weird_ , once she got over the headache from the sharp transition. 

Craning her neck and looking up, the Bell was suspended on nothing (or perhaps something she couldn’t see), reflecting the bright evening sky of the Alpine Skyline– and even here, she could feel the wind and hear the phantom calls of birds both here and there, feel both the clop of mundane stone beneath her boots and the comet-chime sounds of running across stark white palisades.

She almost tripped mid-landing as she hopped across solid-air blocks, because there was _someone else here with her_. 

Her first thought was that there was nothing from Earth would naturally survive in this– by the Tenfold, even she was feeling the strain, and she was actually meant to handle traveling in more than three dimensions!

Her second thought was the realization that she’d only been half right. There _was_ someone else here with her, but they weren’t surviving. The Dwellers were, of course, already dead. Perhaps the planes of death and living intersected here the same way time and space did, for the little ghost to persist without being strung apart like most of the living would. 

Only this one, Hattie noticed, was different. Creepy, in a more harrowing way than the dead usually were. It wasn’t even looking at her like the Subcon Dwellers did, or twirling around in an invitation to play when she was wearing her mask. 

When she crept closer, the faint aura from the bell-perched Dweller caused her to retch, holding back bile and nausea. The Dweller’s bubbles were usually pretty simple things– attuned to a certain few substances, phasing them in and out of a quantum state. Whatever _this_ was, it felt more like passing through a singularity than a benign ghost touching two planes of existence. 

Hattie avoided them, when she could. And they seemed to ignore her in turn, eerily still and unresponsive and looking more dead than even a ghost had any right to be. 

She counted seven of them, each glitchier and more atom-wrenching than the last, and after realizing these were indeed un-living beings instead of some sort of odd Twilight-created existing-and-yet-not constructs, the epiphany sucked her in like a gravity well. 

Hattie realized the huge bell was like a quark-fly trap to the Dwellers– a starglass funnel into an inconceivable pocket of space-time. It was enticingly easy for them to fly into, but almost impossible to escape from. 

She moved on, spurred by the sight of a now-visible Time Piece aura.

Despite the infinite sense of vastness and claustrophobia, and the unnerving sensation of being watched by many and yet so alone, Hattie couldn’t stop the triumphant grin from spreading across her face as her fingers closed around the Time Piece’s rim. Spring in her step, she trotted down the chiming green stairs and activated the warp to her ship. 

Or, at least, she tried to.

A flat sensation, like slamming into an event horizon. 

Grin slipping, Hattie tried again, more forcefully this time. Her species could fold space to warp places, but it took a whole lot of biological energy (she was always so hungry after warping home!), and required a set beacon to guide them without stringing their atoms out like a loose yarn-ball. 

Significantly more worried, she felt out for her ship beacon again, and it _wasn’t there_.

Then, the moment she stopped the attempts to warp, the beacon resurfaced. Everywhere, from every direction at once, trapped inside a box of mirrors where every light was the real source and yet none of them were. 

Well. Peck.

Hattie allowed herself a few seconds of fretting, scanning the unending horizon. The Bell itself was still where she entered, static and eternal. And _she_ wasn’t like the Dwellers, who were trapped by different planes and by their instincts both. 

So. Backtracking it was. 

Tucking the Time Piece under her arm like a ball, Hattie gingerly hopped down the steps and picked her way down the strange scaffolding, mindful of the Time Piece’s aura bending the light awry and making it difficult to see. 

A short trip down the flag-zipline, trudging through water that was neither cold nor hot– to the point it may as well not be real– and something gave Hattie pause. Like a weird itch behind her eyes, and pressure on the Time Piece’s bubble of influence. 

Driven by the insatiable need to poke things, she followed the sensation, activating her Dweller’s Mask and forcing the grate to allow her into a familiar room. The key that used to be in here was, of course, gone– shattered into motes of sound and light after she used it on a void-lock. 

The glitched Dweller, as expected, remained just as eerily still as she left it. 

And then it _looked_ at her.

… It was a very grown-up _eep_ , and she’d swear on the Horizon that she hadn’t actually been startled at all. 

Agonizingly slow, the Dweller twitched away from their position on the bell, stretching out towards– 

The Time Piece. 

And, now that she looked at them, Hattie noted that this Dweller seemed more… alive. Well, as alive as a ghost _could_ be. Green and sinuous as a nebula-river, the Dweller slithered fully off the bell and suddenly appeared rather lost; they looked _past_ Hattie, rather than at her.

Acting on a whim and the vaguest understanding of how the Twilight Bell scrambled the state of being, Hattie activated her mask again. 

The remaining glitches smoothed out from the Dweller’s body, and a very surprised fox mask met her own. With a full-body wriggle that resembled the creature’s face they wore, the Dweller squirmed around her arms and draped themself across her shoulders before Hattie could blink. 

< _Friend-from-home?_ > Echoed in her mind and across her skin, accompanied by a silent song of images and feelings. Subcon Forest, multicolored masked ghosts and little burlap children with flame-blank faces, a furred shadow looming like a thundercloud whose memory was tagged with the feeling of _prince and protector_.

Hattie pinched the bridge of her nose to stave off the pressure headache- the ‘conversation’ with this Dweller was exponentially clearer than it would be in the home dimension, and it felt like getting walloped by an umbrella. 

Absentmindedly scritching behind the Dweller’s mask, Hattie squinted at the sandglass in her hand– still behaving normally, for a Time Piece– and then at the lightscape outside the gate. She wasn’t sure how, exactly, it worked, but somehow the interaction between the Dweller’s Mask and the Time Piece stabilized the distorted Dwellers.

She wondered how long they’d been stuck away from home. 

Mind made up, she sprinted out of the key-room with the Dweller still clinging to her shoulders, path already mapped out and mind made up. 

She held her breath each time a Dweller breached her Time Piece-and-Mask bubble, wondering if _this_ would be the time the Twilight Bell’s functions turned on its head, and that her endeavors would fail. 

But, every time, the Dweller would ‘wake up’ and greet her and their fellow ghosts with equal warmth, each of their unheard voices unique and clear as glass bells. 

With seven Dwellers wrapped around her arms and draped over her shoulders and head, Hattie felt rather like a chronolo-tree must feel when fleece-snakes perch on it to feed off its energy. The ghosts were perfectly pleasant passengers, though, if a little clingy. Careful not to jostle the one wrapped around her head like a snakey crown, Hattie turned the corner of the last pillar on the path to the Bell.

Halted mid-step.

Backed away, slowly, into the shadows of the pillar, as if the flimsy stone could actually hide her. Because there was something on the belfry that _hadn’t been there when she left it_.

Hesitantly, she peeked around the corner again. It was still on the platform, facing away from her, massive head tilted up to look at the bell’s innards. And she got the impression it wasn’t moving anytime soon.

Hattie judged distance and timing and height, deciding to take the risk. It was big, and big things moved slow, right?

Booping away a questing masked nose, she huddled all the Dwellers around her, whispering “Alright, listen up. There’s some hookshots and a short dash across the blocks, then we’re home free when we get past the big guy. So I need you to hang on real tight, okay?”

Seven heads bobbed in an eerily synchronized nod, and Hattie swapped in her Sprint Hat, careful not to dislodge the Dweller still on her head. She double-checked that the Hookshot badge was still on her umbrella, tugged on the Sprint Hat’s unique, speed-giving tang, and _ran_.

Two lightning-fast swings from floating prongs, a sprint across the last block of not-stone, one last leap across the gap onto the belfry and around the strange beast, hookshot already out and extending towards the Bell’s celestial clapper–

It missed. 

The distance between Hattie and the clapper stretched impossibly far, her hookshot falling miles short. 

Caught off guard, an “Oh, _peck_.” slithered from between her teeth as she braced for impact. Hattie hit the ground rolling, her muffled swears accompanied by the squeaks of startled Dwellers. 

A shadow dimmed the evening light seeping from the Bell’s skirt, bright like a summer sunbeam and dark like a silent room. 

She looked up. 

It was too far to possibly reach, and close enough to almost touch. Ever-so-slightly skewed to the side of what should exist in the bounds of space-time. Crescent-moon horns curled above old eyes, and a tender snout blew cloud-cold breath over Hattie, tousling her hair like a time-touched breeze. 

_**< Doeling? >** _

Deep and thrumming, the Twilight Goat silently spoke in full, coherent sentences, in a language Hattie had never encountered on Earth. Words that were scented, and felt, and seen, but not heard.

The Dwellers curled tighter and tucked their faces away from the voice that reverberated through their ectoplasm like thunder; Hattie stood her ground, however unsettled she may be. “... Hi there?”

Ponderously, the goat’s head tilted to the side, the windchimes tied to his horns tinkling in a nonexistent breeze. _**< You do not walk beneath my stars, nor do you smell of those who live across the horizon-line. >**_ He snorted out a gold-smoke breath. _**< Tell me, moon-child, what **_**are _you? >_**

She’d read about life-forms like this, if she was right about what this goat-creature was. An abstraction, or a concept, or a location given a personification and living form, whether through a mortal vessel’s assimilation or just… _appearing_ one day. Though the amount of power relied on the place or idea they were attached to (or rather, the place or idea that they _were_ , as they and their domain were one and the same), Hattie’s tattered old books all concluded with the same information:

 _Beings_ are not people. They are a many-willed locality, an aspect of reality, or an actualized idea. They do not act to help, or to hurt, or to understand. They act to perpetuate their own existence, or act just because they _can_.

“I’m… just a passerby. From very, _very_ far away,” Hattie said. “Just picking up some friends and something of mine I dropped, you know?”

Rumbling laughter, and the star-stained beard brushed stone as the goat lowered his head down to her eye level. _**< So it seems! Not often do mortals step hoof in here- and far less often do they survive. Those who do, however, have never spoken with such impudence. >**_ He met her eyes, and Hattie nervously wondered _how_ , exactly, merging with a dimensional force affected him- because forces of nature were always powerful, and capricious, and rarely kind. _**< Have you not considered, little doeling, that anything that falls in my grasp– that falls into the Twilight– belongs to me by right? As souls belong to Death, when they finally pass into her arms, or as light belongs to the singularity? >**_

 _Use the loophole_. “Souls belong to Death after they pass, but my friends are dead, and have not passed. They belong to nobody.”

_**< A good answer, moon-child. But do not think I missed your omission of the little trinket in your hands. So then, will you take what you have already– that which belongs to nobody, between Death and life– or will you grasp for more? >** _

And now Hattie couldn’t stop the grin from crawling across her face, despite the Dwellers’ very loud fretting raising the hair on the back of her neck. It was a test– this place didn’t play by rules, so she didn’t need to either. “Time doesn’t _belong_ to anyone, silly goat! It just likes to move, and we direct it– _demanding_ instead of asking would probably break something important. Like us. Or the planet’s surface.” She shivered at that last possibility. Planet ᖋᕊᖋリ↸ᒍリᒷ↸ was a stark reminder of those possibilities, and it was still just a planet-sized ball of lava orbiting a dead star.

Ringing silence, and Hattie gripped her umbrella tighter in sweaty palms, ready to make a run for it as the goat’s shaggy shoulders began to shake–

With laughter. 

The Twilight Goat guffawed, shaking his massive head and rearing back on his legs. _**< Well said, little thief! Take that foreign grit out of my night-realm, take your friends, and be on your way. But- >**_ He continued, suddenly somber. _**< -Do take care not to touch aberrations so recklessly. Other Beings are not quite so understanding- I am still quite young, after all, and I remember being mortal still. >**_

Hattie nodded solemnly, and made her way to the clapper, still giving the goat a wide berth. She turned back to wave at the surprisingly mellow beast, and three of the Dwellers waved their tails in imitation. 

This time her hookshot struck true, and she had a sneaking suspicion the Twilight goat had something to do with her misaimed shot earlier. Each swing seemed to take an eternity, but soon Hattie was near blinded by bright cliffsides and cheerful banners, forcing her to take a moment and adjust her eyes- she could withstand looking directly at stars even without atmospheric protection, but it didn’t mean it was an instant change. 

Hattie opened her eyes and scrambled to grab the tail of a wandering Dweller that had detached themself from her arm. “No, nope, stay here, we’re going home, you _cannot_ be trusted by yourselves.”

With the beacon blessedly stable, now, Hattie clawed at it with somewhat more force than necessary, and space folded into a little corner around her, then unfolded to reveal the bridge of her ship. 

Relieved to be back where things were familiar and _made sense_ , Hattie shook herself like a wet dog, scattering the ghosts still hanging on to her. “Okay, shoo, I’ll get you back to the forest soon. You can do… whatever. Just don’t break anything. And stay on the bridge!” She called after the retreating tails.

Trusting them not to get into _too_ much trouble, Hattie scurried up the ladder and poked her head into the kitchen, brightening when she spotted a familiar shade of orange fur.

“Cookie! You’re still here!”

Cooking Cat’s ears swiveled back, and her head soon followed suit. “Oh hey! You’re back already! There’s food in the fridge– you look hungry.”

“Thanks Cookie!” Hattie called, focus zeroed in on the fridge and the treasures it held within. She yanked aside the door to examine the stack of stuffed sandwiches– most likely stocked up for when Cookie went down to film the next set of episodes for her show. Hattie deliberated on which sandwich looked the tastiest. 

She decided on all of them. 

Halfway through her second sandwich, Hattie looked up mid-chew to see Cookie’s amused expression. “Lil’ lady, you weren’t gone that long! Did you warp from halfway across the planet?”

Recalling how she told Cookie about how much energy warping used, Hattie swallowed before answering. “Maybe? It was kind of unclear honestly. And I dunno about you, but for me it was _hours_.” 

Though clearly that response offered more questions than it did answers, judging by Cookie’s expression, the cat said nothing while Hattie continued to sink her fangs into lunch– or dinner, depending on who you asked. Day cycles when up in orbit were weird. 

As she got up to rinse her plate and toss it into the sink, she threw a question over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah, is Snatcher on board?”

“Oh, yes. He’s probably still loitering in your room.” Cookie’s nose wrinkled, whiskers scrunching up in a clear expression of disgust. “I don’t know how you can't sense him in here. Smells like a burning bone-cairn!” 

“Eh, I can’t really smell anything at all anyways,” Hattie shrugged. “Thanks though!”

On her way out, she nearly ran into a large Dweller with a fox’s mask. “Oh, I was just about to go looking for you!” She leaned around the ghost to see a knot of glittering tails. “And everyone’s still here; thank you for keeping them corralled,” She said, patting the Dweller between their ears.

As she jumped and landed on the soft carpet, five blank eyes turned to look at her.

Wait. 

Hattie did another quick headcount, including the Dweller that was by the ladder. 

There were only six. 

A tug at her sleeve, and the fox-masked Dweller stared at her blankly in a silent plea. Sighing, Hattie braced herself and brushed her hand against the sparking body.

< _Won’t come, too much fun, spin-spin-spin!_ > They chanted, woven with water and spiraling motion-shapes. Curiously, their voice was still just as clear as it was in the Twilight Bell– a coherent braid of words-emotions-images, rather than the muted and opaque sensations she remembered from Dwellers in Subcon Forest. 

Was it them who had been changed by the Twilight Bell, or was it her?

Blithely, she decided that was something for Future Hattie to deal with. Right now, she had seven ghost-noodle children to babysit.

“Okay, okay, show me where they are, and I’ll get them out, and you can go home.” Hattie sighed, letting the Dweller lead her on with their tail curled around her coatsleeve. 

Down into the ship’s bowels, past the creaking engine, down the elevator to the water treatment center, into the side-room, and-

Hattie tried to suppress a snort, and failed. There, soaking wet and wheeling around, the smallest Dweller spun inside her dirty laundry cleaner like a hapless passenger in a wheeling spaceship– the kind that used rotational gravity rather than more modern artificial gravity. 

While Fox-mask was still tugging at her sleeve with worry, the yellow Dweller inside the washing machine was clearly having the time of their un-life. Hattie tapped on her own mask to commit the frankly hilarious image to her Camera Badge before she cut off the ghost’s fun.

The water shut off, the spin cycle slowed, and Hattie popped open the glass door for the Dweller to tumble out in a heap. From the knot of ectoplasm, a skunk-masked head emerged and wobbled about drunkenly. 

Still grinning at their antics, Hattie scooped up the Dweller and draped them over her shoulders like a scarf, ignoring their mental impression of swirling rain and projected cheer of < _Wheeee!_ >

Damp Dweller recovered, Hattie marched back up to the bridge and led the procession of remaining ghosts up the tunnel into her room, their eagerness nipping at her heels like seed-sparks.

Heralding her arrival with a shout of “Hey, Snatcher! I found something of yours!”, she swiped the door open to see him still perched on the edge of her pillow-pile, reading a definitely-stolen-from-her-library book that looked comically tiny in his weird, lanky chameleon hands.

Glowing, fire-smoke eyes glanced up from the book, and then widened at the tangle of Dwellers writhing across the room to get to him. 

“Kid, what-” Snatcher started, cut off by the tiniest Dweller ramming into his throat and burying themself in his shaggy ruff. 

Hattie unsuccessfully hid her laughter behind laundry-soap-stained hands as Snatcher grumbled wordlessly at the ghosts twining around him, peeling off a Dweller wrapped around his wrist and dangling them by the tail in front of a fire-torn shadow-face.

“Ugh, where have you _been_ , you feel like you’ve been eating magnets!” He scolded, absentmindedly smoothing back the patchy fur on his wrist that the specter had ruffled up.

The Dweller then looped between his claws, and they must have shown him _something_ in that odd wordless way they did, because Snatcher dropped the little ghost like salted ice, expression scrunching so far up that his backlit features disappeared into the void of his face.

Hattie couldn't help but agree with the sentiment– feeling and seeing the Twilight unprepared was a jarring experience, even through the opaque and imperfect sense-sharing Dwellers used. 

Snatcher’s face untwisted to reveal a mighty scowl, and he pressed his fingers to where his nose would be if he had one, as if attempting to squeeze away a tension headache. “What the _heck_ , kiddo. _That’s_ where these brats have been for the last century? How did they even _get_ in there?” An openly bewildered look in her direction. “And how did you get _out_ of there? You’re alive!”

Supremely unhelpful, Hattie just shrugged away his last question. “I dunno, Earth people are just way too molecularly flimsy. And I found them– okay, y’know how at the Skyline there’s a bunch of goats that have some weird spiritual convent?”

Snatcher shrugged. “Eh, sure, I’ve had a few ‘pilgrims’ as contractors.” He leaned forward and grinned; more bared teeth than anything cheerful. “Their souls were _quite_ delicious.”

She deliberately ignored the attempt at intimidation– he was all hot air and smoke on the inside. “Well, apparently the huge bell they have up there leads to that… place.” She said, trudging over and plopping down into her swiveling desk chair.

Hattie jumped at the sudden struck-match hiss of sparks as the corner of her room darkened and the purple candles flared. Mane bristling and spark-sharp fangs bared, this was the angriest Hattie had _ever_ seen him– even during their fight, there was a certain nonchalance to his mood. Not so, here. 

“You mean to tell me this bedazzled bastard has a direct channel to this plane? To _my_ forest?” He snarled, an odd heat-shimmer shrouding him like air over embers.

(Later, Hattie would realize she’d never been able to see that wavelength before her journey through the Bell, and that it looked remarkably similar to the frequency that buzzed around the Twilight Goat. But now, she had more tangible concerns to address.)

The Dwellers draped over him curled in further at his directionless rage, and while he was clearly itching for some kind of competitor to fight off, Snatcher stayed rooted to the corner of her pillow-pile, weaving his head like an enormous owl’s threat display.

Hattie reached beneath her desk, grabbing a large bouncy ball- the one with Snatcher’s face crudely painted on it, because a Subconite once hitched a ride back to her ship alongside her and they tagged _everything_ they got their mitts on with their boss’s face- and beaned the growling spirit right in the face with it. 

He didn’t even bother to swat it away or blast it to ashes, as if he was seeing nothing but the boundaries of his territory and the Being he perceived as a threat to them. The ball bounced right off his face, cutting the rumbling growl off with a rusty squawk. “Hey, what was that for!”

Even when snapped out of his previous inhuman aggravation, Snatcher’s lamp-lit glare still held the ragged edge of intimidation. But it was _familiar_ irritation, mundane annoyance, rather than… whatever that was. “Yeah, well what are you so worked up about? The goat can’t even reach this plane!” Hattie exclaimed, swinging her hand horizontally to illustrate her point.

“I still don’t like the idea of him being so close,” Snatcher grumbled, posture loosening and Dwellers writhing out of their fluffy hiding spots. “I don’t care if he can’t leave his Bell, I’m keeping an eye on that place now.”

What a weirdo. “Suit yourself,” Hattie replied, bouncing out of her chair and beginning the arduous task of burrowing to her pillow fort. “And _you’re welcome_ for bringing back your kids!” She muttered under her breath sarcastically, knowing that extracting a genuine ‘thank you’ from Snatcher was like squeezing a few seconds from a sandless Time Piece.

Although she didn’t mutter quite discreetly enough, apparently. “They’re not my kids!” He hissed, offended, as if she had grievously insulted his pride and station. “They’re my _underlings_.”

Subtle laughter muffled by the fluff and pillows, Hattie emerged inside the cozy dome of her fort, false candle burning warmly and her diary open and inviting her in.

She scribbled a bit on the corner to make sure her pen was still working, and began her log. 

_“Cycle #21 above Eᔑ∷ℸ ̣ ⍑,_

_I think I saw some ghosts today? Goat ghosts? Or maybe not a ghost, he was weirddddd. Maybe I should have paid attention to the stuffy class about the ‘sanctity of the creatures who govern our natural laws and our worlds’ or whatever._

_I don’t know where that bell took me, but it certainly wasn’t somewhere I was supposed to be.”_

-

_“-Beings, as living actualizations, fall into two basic families: corporeal and non-corporeal._

_Corporeal Beings preside over, and in effect_ are _, a location or a phenomenon. They can vary greatly in size and energy; there are Beings that are black holes, or are dimensional folds, or are merely planets. They are also extraordinarily territorial between each other– clashes between corporeal Beings are rare, but have been recorded in the distant past between Beings of a planet and a wormhole who too drifted close to each other_

 _The unifying factors for this wide variety are twofold: the Beings of these phenomena and locations possess a physical body of some description, and these Beings were once a single, mortal entity before becoming their domain. No one knows the precise mechanics of this incorporation, but attempts to replicate it are strictly controlled and are_ not _to be replicated by non-Council-affiliated parties._

 _Non-corporeal Beings, by contrast, were never one of us. They are the personifications of concepts, and the fabric of existence. These Beings, like all of their kind, are very territorial– however, their domains stretch across the phenomena that govern our universe, and as such we cannot avoid touching their territory, but we can avoid_ infringing _upon it. This philosophy is what allowed our empire to persist so successfully; by perfectly mapping the boundaries of Time’s domain, we can harness, direct, and even contain its energy._

 _Now, as for protocol! You will find all the specifics and exact measurements in your textbooks, but do pay attention to the hologram behind me. The remains of this planet are a milder, and more recent, result of trespassing upon Time’s domain. You_ must _remember that we are the dominant species, and highly-evolved, but even we are subject to that which shapes the universe.”_

-Tempus Educational Archive (XXXXX A.E.). Guest lecture by Dr. Aリᔑリ▢ᒷ to 3rd Bar students.

**Author's Note:**

> Snatcher seeing the Twilight Goat and getting an eyeful of the Twilight Bell unprepared:
> 
> Things like quark-fly, fleece-snake, and chronolo-tree are just ideas for things that might exist as native species in Hat Kid’s homeworld. Most of them are time-based, and ‘chronolo-tree’ is just a pun on ‘chronology’. Also the idea of fluffy snakes basking in temporal power from the trees and then being shorn for their wool to make funky powerful hats entertains me.
> 
> [Mashes up some in-story dialogue about Beings and Genius Loci/Anthropomorphic Personifications] It’s a surprise tool that will help us later! I have a very strong love for these tropes alongside the use of xenopsychology (including psych in relation to literal forces of nature) and Blue and Orange Morality, so expect it to come up a lot. Let’s just say Hat Kid got very, very lucky that her first encounter (or, at least, first _knowing_ encounter) with a Being was with the fairly benign (if still operating on a different moral axis than we are) Twilight Goat. He’s just Vibing.
> 
> And, lastly, as a fun little bit of information: sufficiently damaging burns, including ice burns, can damage the follicles and prevent hair regrowth.
> 
> Yall know the drill. Like, comment, and subscribe (or just comment, that works too. pls.)  
> On tumblr i can be found on Anankos, Hrathruyan, or Banyanas, and on twitter you can find me @Nosferatank


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